Friday 13 March 2015

People Are Flinging Shit At Me.

I've recently been introduced to a new smartphone app called Fling. If you don't know what it is, it's your generic photo-sending app but, instead of sending it to a specific person or group of people that you select, it flings it to a random 50 people who also have the Fling app.

A friend of mine told me she was enjoying it and advised me to have a look at it if I got bored.

Then I got bored.

I thought it sounded like a laugh. Honestly, my gut reaction to that description of it was somewhat naive. My first thought was how much we could learn about the rest of the world. I thought about all the things I didn't know about culture in other countries that I'd pick up from the things that strangers found interesting enough to share. I thought how cool it would be to take it round a museum and share the things that fascinated me with people who weren't there.

And after using it five seconds I realised that that's actually quite a childish thought.

Because obviously people aren't going to send interesting things. They're not going to send the kind of exciting things you'd get excited about. They're going to send photos of their duck faces and their genitals and, for some reason, their knees.

I've been using it for not even two days and I've lost count of the times I've seen "mycock4urtits". As if there aren't boobs aplenty to be found on the internet. Without the hassle of asking for them. Or risking having a stranger mock a photo of your dick. (Because that's what girls do. We judge them. I promise.)

And yet, I am going to keep Fling. I am going to try to resist the urge to send photos of "no one cares" scrawled on a Post-It note every time I get a selfie or a testicle. And I am going to take it to museums and galleries and parks and places that are exciting and interesting and I am going to try to use it to educate some strangers.

I'll probably fail. But, I'll also enjoy knowing that I tried.

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